Chaouki Choukini, Installation view at Green Art Gallery, Dubai, 2019
Chaouki Choukini fell in love with wood sculpture when he began spending his school vacations volunteering at a carpenter’s workshop near his home in Beirut. “I enjoyed it because I could make my own toys,” he says. Later at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he worked mostly with clay and stone. After meeting and training with Japanese maestro of wood sculpting, Fumio Otani, Choukini was inspired to return to wood and developed his unique language of mystical abstraction. Green Art Gallery is celebrating the French-Lebanese artist’s five-decade long practice with an exhibition surveying his work from the 1970s to the present and the release of his monograph, Corpus, published by Kaph Books.